What truths did your parents shield you from, with good intentions?

[letsgomaths]

Not a judgment about whether it was for better or worse, but I'm curious about this. I think my parents were honest about many things, but here are a few things they didn't tell me at the time, for very good reasons, some of which I only found out about as an adult:

How bad things were between my dad's parents, before their divorce. Although I knew and loved those grandparents individually, I never saw them together; I just knew that I was not to mention one to the other. My dad later said that as he had been brought up on conflict, being married to my mum made him calmer over the years.

That my parents were planning to relocate a very long distance, and had packed me and my brother off to a friend for an overnight stay, while they visited the house we might have lived in. This move never happened in the end.

That on a residential trip with a youth group when I was six, some of the teenage helpers were doing what teenagers do, in the children's dormitories (in the daytime, while the children were busy doing other things): this was in the 1980s, long before safeguarding. My dad was a helper on said trip, and he said that some of the children knew what was happening; but I knew nothing about this until many years later. He also cut the trip short because of this.

Goodness, lots of these are very sweeping. @Scarby9 The fairytale one with the altered ending! I'm guessing it wasn't a classic, well-known fairytale.

Somehow, as a child and even in my early teens, I was blissfully unaware of social class, and my parents did not enlighten me about money. I went to a school with people from lots of different backgrounds, and I knew that some people have more money than others, but I didn't connect it at all to what sort of house they lived in, or realise what a big deal this is to some people; I didn't understand some of the humour of Fawlty Towers as a result ("I just want to keep the riff-raff away, dear"). To me, "poor" always meant like Hansel and Gretel.

That my grandfather had cancer, when I was ten/ eleven. I remember a school friend asking me if he was better (her grandparents knew mine) and I had no idea why she was asking. I found out after he died. I can understand not telling a child about cancer, but I don’t think they even told me that he was ill

@letsgomaths
I'm afraid it was well-known! I don't know how I managed to retain my innocence right through to the age of 22...

In my version of the tale (traditional tale, rather than fairy story, actually), the kind fox gave the gingerbread man a lift over the river. No biscuits were harmed in my sanitised version.

That the electricity had been cut off. There had been general power cuts (70s) so I assumed this was the same. Don't know how I thought the street lamps were working.

Scarby9 To be fair to your mum, I've always hated that ending!

I suspect it's one of those 'improving' tales that's meant to teach children to do what they're told, else you'll come to a bad end).

I always felt bad for the old couple who so wanted a child, then bad for the gingerbread man who got eaten up. The worse ones are the versions where the fox eats him bit by bit - at least the Ladybird version had him swallowed in one gulp.

That my childhood asthma was as bad as it was.
I knew I was ill, I was hospitalised three times. One day we were watching a documentary about an A&E unit and there was a boy with bad asthma. I asked if I had been as I'll as him. Mum said no.
I put the pieces together much later as my mum had let slip she'd been asked to leave the room on my third admission. Probably because I was in need of serious intervention or resuscitation.
However - there were other "family secrets" that we did know all about as my mum couldn't see the point in pretending. I think with my asthma she just didn't want to think about how serious it was for a very long time.

My hippy parents are horrified by the concept of trying to get a job that pays well. I grew up thinking that eg accountants are soulless drones, and almost a separate species to me.

Got to university, met tons of interesting people studying for well paid vocations and was embarrassed by my initial reactions which must have seemed really rude.

Now in middle age most of the people I'm friends with have 'boring' jobs that allow them to afford pleasant lifestyles. I wish I had known that this was a thing.

That my grandmother was schizophrenic, and had spent her entire adult life in and out of psychiatric hospitals, including very long stays. Unfortunately I found out aged 13 when a policeman turned up at 8am to ask mum if she'd seen her as she was missing again, and this time it turned out she'd finally succeeded in killing herself. I'd always had the gaps in seeing her explained away, and they very carefully managed our time with her, so my memories of her are the extra strong mints in a jar, a tupperware full of chocolate on the top shelf in the larder, and her massive collection of shoes (size 2) which lived under the sofa. But it was very difficult to process her suicide, esp when the adults were so resigned to the fact it would happen at some point

@Scarby9 You would not have liked the version of the Gingerbread Man which I had. It had a cardboard gingerbread man on a string, which was looped through a hole in each page. For example, it said "and he disappeared beneath a cart", and you pushed him through the hole underneath a cart. On the last page, you had to push him through a slot in the fox's mouth (huge and full of teeth), back to the beginning of the book. So you would actually send the gingerbread man to his doom yourself!

@sleepyhead Speaking of Ladybird books, some of those we had with the cassettes were so sad that my parents couldn't bear to hear them. Notable examples were The Happy Prince, and Snow White, when the dwarfs were mourning her, especially as they were accompanied by carefully chosen classical music. "They took it in turns to sit always near the coffin, day and night."

My brother didn't like hearing the story of Abraham and Isaac. His conclusion was "but what about the poor ram?" (The one sacrificed instead of Isaac.)